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I’m not sure how you measure the attention span of a goldfish, but those who know have determined that as of 2013, our average attention span is less (8 seconds) than that of your average goldfish (9 seconds).

Fortunately, Vine is within range with six-second video and Twitter, of course, keeping it brief with 140 characters. Web lore had it that we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text and while that’s not necessarily the case, a team of neuroscientists from MIT recently found that the human brain can process entire images the eye sees for as little as 13 milliseconds.

There are many ways to tell your story to engage your audience with illustrations, data, video and text. Here are some free or reasonably-priced tools and some formats you can use for presentations and for social media:

Quotes Cover, www.quotescover.com, is easy to use to make a quote eye-catching for e-cards, wallpaper, prints, posters and social media. Just paste any quote into the toolbar, select fonts and colors, and design using the program’s drawing tools. Then you can share on social media or download the image.

Piktochart, http://piktochart.com, provides templates; an image gallery with icons, maps and charts; and editing tools to create appealing, searchable infographics. You can incorporate your own photos and art and, once you like it, you can link, embed, email or share it.

IMGFlip, https://imgflip.com/memegenerator, is an image generator that allows you to position one or two lines of text on top of a photo to make a meme that can then be shared.

Common Craft, http://www.commoncraft.com, uses cut out character videos to explain a broad range of complex processes simply, including: how we elect the U.S. President, plagiarism, how to prepare an emergency kit, and what augmented reality is all about. You can also download their cutouts and create your own how-to videos.

Tiki-Toki, www.tiki-toki.com, and Dipity, www.dipity.com, are tools to create illustrated timelines. Tiki-Toki also has a group version upgrade where you can create a timeline that then allows students or others to add to and interact with the timeline you’ve created.

Another visual technique that you can use to engage your audience is visual note-taking where you combine drawings, doodles and text to illustrate a concept or process. This can also work well for an online contest where fans submit an illustrated panel about an aspect of your book to show what they thought about as they read about an event or character.

These, along with YouTube, Instagram, Flickr, and Pinterest will provide opportunities for using images for creative branding. And, of course, keep in mind that using text is also good, given that the 8 second attention span we now have is only down from the 12 seconds reported for humans in 2000. Goldfish, I believe, remained constant given that they rarely use the Internet.